E-Mail This Article to a Friend In love again After a soul-searching hiatus from music (and with a book deal in hand), Jen Trynin’s back in the business with Loveless BY TAMARA WIEDER

FOR TWO YEARS, Jen Trynin didn’t pick up her guitar.

In the life of a musician, that’s an exceptionally long time to avoid an instrument that, for a while, seemed like it would be the propeller on the route to stardom. But after a whirlwind rise — accolades in national press, a major-label bidding war for her work — Trynin endured an equally drastic fall when Warner Bros. dropped her contract at the end of the 1990s. So she put her music away. She went to school. She married producer Mike Denneen. She had a baby.

Then she returned to music.

No longer front and center, Trynin’s now a sidewoman, playing guitar with Loveless — along with veterans Dave Wanamaker, Pete Armata, and Tom Polce — and loving every minute of it. Not that she’s trying to forget her major-label experiences; on the contrary, her rocky ride is the subject of a book she’s contracted to write for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tentatively titled Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be, the book is scheduled for publication in 2005.

Q: So tell me how things are going with Loveless.

A: I think they’re going well. Last night we played at the Mercury Lounge in New York, and we play there — well, when I’m not pregnant or in early childcare, we play there about once a month. We play down in the city about once a month. And it was good; we’re beginning to get a little bit of a following there, the room was pretty full. We just put out our first record, and it’s getting some interest here and there from the so-called major labels, whatever that means in this day and age. And mostly, for me, it’s just a lot of fun. That’s really why I’m doing it now. You know, I used to do my own music and that got not fun, and I stopped doing that for a few years, and now it’s just fun again. I love the guys I play with, they’re all really funny, and it’s just a good time.

Q: What are the biggest differences between playing with Loveless, being more of a background person, and playing as a solo artist?

A: I’d say one of the main differences is I don’t feel any pressure. I always thought of myself as someone who handled pressure pretty well, but come to find out, like in the music-business thing, being the focal point 24 hours a day got really wearing on me. It might’ve been more fun had everything gone better. But I don’t know, I think that I ended up just focusing more on, I don’t know, trying to make it work, and it’s very hard to make it work. I’m not the most natural performer in the world, and I’m definitely not a natural singer, and so it takes a lot of work for me, and I ended up losing the love of the original thing, and once that was gone, I didn’t know what I was doing there anymore. And being a side person, especially with this group of guys, I get to play guitar and do some singing, and I really like the music, and I’m in more of a supportive role, and I’m more comfortable with it. It’s just fun. If the show goes well, then I’m really happy, and if the show doesn’t go well, then I’m like, "Oh, we’ll do better next time." I don’t care, but in a good way. I don’t mean that I don’t care at all, but the stakes aren’t the same for me personally. I’m the younger sister of one brother, and I’m kind of used to the role of sidekick, and second-guessing everybody, and sitting in the backseat saying, "No, take a left!" as opposed to sitting in the front seat and going, "Okay, we’re taking a left, and this is why, and it’s going to work out."

Q: Is there anything that you miss about being a solo artist?

A: I guess the main thing I miss is my love of writing music. I would say that’s the biggest thing. Dave Wanamaker is the songwriter. Dave does the main songwriting. When we learn the songs and stuff, I make up some parts and Dave tells me to play some stuff, so it’s not as actively creative a writing outlet as my own thing was, certainly. So I guess I miss that, and I’m not sure I really miss anything else.

Q: I’m surprised there aren’t more things about it that you miss. I wonder if that’s because your solo career became so uncomfortable at the end?

A: I think that the part about getting up in front of people and playing my own thing — in great part, it was always uncomfortable. And I think that really came across sometimes in my shows and my presentation of myself, because, you know, when I started doing this a million years ago when I was a kid, I honestly never pictured myself being a performer. I always thought I would be a songwriter, and I would give my music to people. And somewhere along the way, I don’t know what happened, but I kind of started playing in front of people, and it went pretty well. You know, I’m really not that great a singer, so I think that was always kind of a problem for people.

Q: I think a lot of people would disagree and say that you are.

A: Well, I think that’s nice, and I’m always interested in that reaction, and pleased, because I worked pretty hard at it. But I don’t know, sometimes I think if you have to really work hard at something, then there’s something lost in the genuineness or something. And that always kind of bugged me, and because I was always nervous about my singing, [performing] just made me nervous, and when I get nervous, my throat gets tight, and my singing gets worse, and it’s just downhill. But I really loved writing music, and I did it with so much of my time, and I do miss that. I fully hope to do more of my own music in my life, but never in the way that I did it before, because I just didn’t like it.

Q: How long was your hiatus from the music business?

A: I didn’t play guitar, I didn’t even pick up a guitar for almost two years. For the first time since I started playing when I was, like, 10.

Q: What did you do during that time?

A: For a year I actually enrolled full-time at the Harvard Extension School. I took economics. I wanted to go back and take calculus because I never took calculus when I was young.

Q: You wanted to go back and take calculus? I’ve never heard anyone say that.

A: I know, everyone finds that to be so strange. I thought — and after experiencing taking calculus I still believe it’s true — that there’s some very basic, natural movements that come to play in all forms of art, including music very much so, and also in writing. And there are just certain ways of movement. I don’t really remember exactly why I got so into it, but I just thought there was something there that could help me get on to the next level of creating stuff. It’s just a much more basic look at movement without feeling, I guess. Because when you write a song, there’s movement, but there’s also all this emotion involved. And I thought it would help clear up my mind; I was feeling really brain-dead after my music experience, because there was so little actual music and so much crap that I was feeling foggy.

So I took that, I took a psychology course. After a year of doing a lot of math stuff mostly, I went back for my second year and I started taking writing classes there. I was a creative-writing major in college and I really missed writing, and so that kind of got me back into writing, and that’s how I started writing this book. I didn’t realize I was writing a book back then, but that’s how it all happened. And then Dave called me up one day and told me to stop being a weenie and that he wanted me to play guitar in his new band.

Q: Did it take much convincing?

A: He called me on a good day. Because other people approached me and I really had no interest. Like, the very sound of the guitar at that point made me unhappy. So I don’t know why that day I said yes, but it started very slowly. He was like, "Come out and hear my songs, I’m going to play at an open mike," so I did, and I liked them, and then we kind of played a couple times and it just kept growing, and now it’s like a full-fledged thing. It’s nice. It’s nice the way it happened.

Q: Tell me about this book.

A: The book is based on my experiences in the music business. It’s really just a book, I’m hoping, about this very specific American dream of being a rock star. I’m just trying to look at what that is, and why, especially today, so many people want to be rock stars.

Q: Is that what you wanted to be?

A: I don’t know. That’s part of why I started writing this book. I started writing it about a year after I stopped playing. People kept asking me why I’d quit, and I didn’t have a good answer. I just kept getting really tongue-tied, and I didn’t want it to come off like, you know, I couldn’t win so I quit. Because it really wasn’t that. I never knew what to say, so I started looking at it, and one of the questions is, what did I want? And then in a broader way, what do people want when they say they want that? Why are we so focused on the fame-and-fortune thing, instead of being focused just more locally on our lives and our families, the old-fashioned way? There’s a very easy answer, which is the world, because of communication now, is just in a sense a much smaller place, and so instead of being the prettiest girl in your town, you want to be the prettiest girl, period. That’s kind of a simple answer, though.

So that’s kind of the topic, I suppose, and then I’m using my own specific experience to try to look at that. I was never a rock star, I wasn’t even close, but I did get far enough so that I was at least at the bottom of the top heap. It was a very interesting experience; obviously I learned a lot about myself and how the world works in the real way, as opposed to how you wish it works. I just think that a lot of people get this fantasy in their head of what it is to be a "rock star," and when I would talk about it with people, they’d say, "What’s up with you, how are you doing?" And I would tell them the real thing, and it was like they wouldn’t believe me: "Oh, it must be cooler than that!" But the fact is, a lot of it isn’t all that cool. There’ve been some movies and stuff about being in the rock world. I kind of think of my book as the anti–Almost Famous. That movie was written about a very different time, and it was also written about men, and what is it like to be in a rock band, and you’re having sex with people and doing drugs. And you know, I wasn’t doing drugs or having sex with anybody. Maybe that reflects poorly on me, I don’t know. For me it was just a lot of traveling around, feeling very disoriented and very lonely. All my relationships, not with the people in my band but in all my other relationships which took up a lot of time every day, it was these very surface relationships. Day in and day out, you’re in different cities meeting different people who are representatives from your record label, and you’ve got to sit in the car with them for 45 minutes when they take you to the radio station, and it was just a lot of forced conversations. It was fucking killing me. I don’t mind going out a couple times a month and having small talk with people, but doing it every day — woo. It was tough. The book, right now it’s ... about a week on the road, and you just kind of follow — I had this one song that seemed like maybe it was going to be a hit, and you just kind of follow the song up the chart, and then it doesn’t become a hit, and what is that really like? That’s kind of what the book is based on. And there’s also another section — you know, what made my story a little bit different from a lot of people’s is the way I got signed: I was in the center of one of the biggest bidding wars of that year, and that was very strange ...

Q: I can’t imagine.

A: That’s why I’m writing this book! You know, what that’s like: begging to get an opening slot on a Tuesday night, and six months later headlining places, or playing at a college someplace in a cafeteria and having 13 record labels show up. It’s a little weird. So those are the two parts of the action. And what I’m trying to do, and I’ll find out if I do it or not, I’m just trying to talk about and explore that initial idea of who are we, why do we want this, within the context of those two settings.

Q: So now when people ask you why you quit, do you have an answer for them?

A: I say read my book! It’s a complicated answer. And also people come up to me and go, "Oh, man, you got fucked! Man, the record-business assholes!" And they have this whole attitude about it. And that’s just not true. I didn’t get fucked. It’s a very complicated business, life is very complicated, there are many, many factors that go into when something pops above the fray and becomes a hit, and that happens very rarely. Most of the time it’s this whole ménage of screwy events that happen; either it all comes together and coalesces or it doesn’t. I mean occasionally, yes, people get screwed. But I certainly didn’t. I was treated as well as I could’ve been, and I always felt that, and when I got dropped, it was more of a mutual discussion than nobody returning my phone calls. So I’ve never felt poorly treated at all. And that’s very important to me. I’m trying to talk about that in the book because it’s just not the way I felt.

Q: How different is the songwriting process from the book-writing process?

A: I’ve never written a book before, but I’ve written lots of short stories, and I would say — and this relates back to the calculus thing — what happens in a three-minute pop song and what happens in the creative process of putting that together, and what happens in a short story, at least in my experience, that’s not a dissimilar process. It’s kind of like standing on a road, and you look down the road, like in Ohio or something, and it’s so flat you can see for like a mile and half, and you can see a few road signs, and then you can kind of see where the road takes a left, and that’s where it ends. And you can see it as you’re starting from the beginning. And both for pop songs and for short stories, that’s how I feel, so I always feel kind of like I know what I’m doing, and I know where I’m going to take this turn, and that turn, and then we have to do the bridge here. And short stories have very, very similar arcs to them. Writing a book ...

Q: You can’t see anything.

A: I can’t see shit! It’s totally, to use a lame analogy, like walking around in the dark, and you just bump into stuff, and either you include what you bump into or you don’t include what you bump into. And since I’m deeply in the throes of writing it, I don’t know how it ends. Whenever I’m writing something, I don’t know where that is compared to where I’m going to be. It’s very confusing and sometimes a little scary, and when it goes well it’s really fun, and when it goes poorly, it’s awful. To have a feeling that you want to express in a song, you get some words and you get this whole palette of color — music — that includes melodies and rhythm and whether you’re going to play loud or soft, and you get all of this stuff to be able to express your emotions and your point. In writing, you get nothing but words. That’s very different. That’s kind of the challenge. And depending on my mood, I wrote stories and songs, I would interchange them, I don’t know, for 15 years or something. So I’d write a couple songs, and then I’d feel constrained by that and I’d write a short story, and then I’d feel constrained by that, and I’d go back and forth between the two. And now, I’ve committed to writing this book, so I’m limited to the words. I’m trying to do it. I don’t know if I’m doing it well or not.

Q: You’ve done some readings in Boston. Is getting up for a reading different for you than getting up and performing music? Is it easier, harder?

A: Much easier. It’s pretty different. But it’s definitely easier, because I’ve always had terrible stage fright, because I can just get wacky and totally blank out and forget words, forget a song, forget where I am completely, and it’s very bad. And with doing readings, you have the words right there in front of you. What’s the worst that can happen? You get a tickle in your throat and have a coughing fit.

Q: Or lose your place.

A: You can lose your place, but then you go, "Oh, I just lost my place," and everyone laughs, and you go back. So it’s much less anxiety-producing. And I really enjoy it; I’ve always loved doing readings, you know, when I was in college and stuff. And I love being read to. So I love the whole thing.

Q: I’m sure you have musical influences. Do you have literary influences?

A: Yeah. When I was young I was really into John Updike, and read everything by him for a long time. I’m a fan of Dave Eggers; I think he’s a great writer. I know he’s very controversial and people either love him or hate him. Right when I had stopped doing music, I happened to hear him — I didn’t know who he was — on This American Life, and I heard him reading from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I sat there — I was picking up my dry cleaning or something — and I was just riveted, and I just sat there listening to him. I was like, this is great. I miss writing. That was one of the things that got me back into writing. It was like the first time I’d felt inspired in a long time. I could name all my friends around here who I think are great writers — I don’t know if that’s a good thing to do or a bad thing to do. I’ve read a lot of Dennis Lehane stuff, and Laura Zigman, and Tom Perrotta, Brad Watson. All of these people, I’ve learned a ton from everybody. Another person who I really love is Jon Krakauer. I’m so into his books. I loved Into Thin Air, but the book that got me into him — and I read it like three times, and I was on the road and it just really spoke to me — was the book Into the Wild.

Q: You’re a writer, a musician, a mother to a 10-month-old daughter. How do you have time for it all?

A: Well, I don’t watch as much television! I can’t go out because I have to be home because she’s home. I have an incredibly supportive and helpful husband who takes her almost every morning. We have someone who comes in a few afternoons a week and spends a few hours. Depending on her mood, she goes to sleep anywhere from 7:30 to 10:30 at night. But very often she goes to bed around eight or 8:30. She’s a dream. She’s the greatest little girl. And she’s so easy to be with anyway that it’s pretty low stress at this point. I often get a lot of work done at night. And with Loveless, we never rehearse, so that cuts down on that! Two of us are in Boston, two are in New York, so we never rehearse, we just play shows. So there’s no real rehearsal time, although I do practice to the record maybe a week before we do a show, I practice every day to the record. And, you know, I don’t have a regular job. When people say it back to me, I’m like, wow, that is a lot to do! But it’s really not so bad.

Q: Do you think becoming a parent has changed you as a musician?

A: I don’t go out as much, so when I go out — in fact, often the only time I go out the whole month is when we play, and I’m so fucking happy to be out, I think I play with more exuberance and abandon.

Q: More joy.

A: I think so, yeah. I think joy is the word. I’m more joyful of life in general since having her. I was kind of just such a down-in-the-mouth person for so long that I was like, "Oh, I couldn’t be a parent anyway," and "Who cares, they get born, everybody dies." It was awful. I had a really bad attitude about it. But, oh. I could never recommend it more highly as the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s just the greatest thing in the world. I love her, I love being with her, it has brought things out in me that I guess I didn’t know were in me. It just makes you see life in such a different way. It’s like the meaning of life is just in every single day. I just didn’t used to get that. Sadly. I wish I’d learned it a whole lot earlier.

Q: Well, some people never learn it.

A: I guess maybe that’s true. I don’t think I would’ve. I just kept thinking life was sometime in the future. And that’s totally wrong. And she has definitely helped to teach me that. So in general she just makes me a much happier person to be alive. And grateful and all those things.

Q: Do you think you ever would’ve become a writer if you hadn’t first been a musician? Would you have written a book? Obviously it would’ve been about different subject matter.

A: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when I got out of college, I literally sat myself down about six months afterward and said to myself — I just felt like I had to stop splitting my attention between writing and music, and I should just make a decision to commit to one of them. And it was very simple; I guess I just thought, you can only rock when you’re young, so I thought, I’m going to commit myself to music until I’m 30, and hopefully get something going, and if I don’t, then I’m going to go to writing. And then if I do get something going, I’ll do that until it ends and then I’ll go back to writing. And that’s what I did. I kind of stuck with the plan.

Jen Trynin reads at Newtonville Books’ "Rock ’n’ Roll Will Save Your Life" event at the Attic Bar, Newton, on January 16. Call (617) 244-6619. Loveless play a CD-release show at Bill’s Bar, in Boston, on January 30. Call (617) 421-9678. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com